Liz started to laugh, looked down at Billy Phillips and stopped herself. “There’s no such thing in real life. Only in cities. Only bad people.”
“How do you know that?”
Because Liz would rather read novels than play outdoors, because she lived on Casabella Road in Rinconada, California, because she had looked hard enough at the new world for one day.
“I bet Jeanne came down here and got them.”
“How come?”
“She probably remembered and—”
“No.”
Liz stared at the back of her friend’s head. The wild mass of blonde curls and tangles, silver in the moonlight.
“She would have told me. She would have called.”
“It’s late.”
“Not that late. Not even midnight yet.”
Jeanne loved the telephone.
“She called me at two in the morning when her dog died.”
Liz looked down at Billy Phillips. His right arm lay awkwardly with the palm of his hand facing straight up and the fingers curved toward the calloused palm as if about to grab something. She wished they had at least closed his eyes earlier but it was too late. From books she knew his eyeballs were dry and dusty now. Pretty soon they would start to wrinkle up and fall back into their sockets. His mouth was open, and she remembered a song from third grade: The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out/ The worms play pinochle on your snout.
“We gotta go.” Liz knew if she didn’t get away from Bluegang and fast she would be caught there forever. She imagined Billy Phillips’s hand grabbing her ankle, pulling her down to lie beside him. She clambered back up the hill.
Hannah did not move.
“We have to get out of here.” Liz held out her hand.
“It could have been a tramp, huh?”
“If you don’t come now, I’m leaving you.” It wasn’t true. She would not abandon her friend, not ever and they both knew it. It was the kind of thing tough-minded Jeanne would say. “Jeanne’s got ’em. I bet she shows ’em to you tomorrow.”
But she didn’t and early next morning when it was reported that two boys with fishing poles had discovered the body and run into town to tell Sheriff Bacci, Hannah Whittaker’s Saturday panties were not mentioned.
Florida
“Water walls,” Liz Shepherd said. “I’m standing on the balcony and I can’t even see the building across the street.” She held the cell phone out over the abyss. Fifteen stories down the swimming pool was a blue baguette. “Can you hear it?”
Hannah Tarwater sighed from California. “Bring it with you. Please.”
“California’s got enough natural disasters without importing hurricanes.”
“Is it windy?”
“Mostly just wet.” In the bathroom Liz had hung her drenched raincoat over the tub. Her boots were in the tub leaving muddy prints. “We’ve had more than an inch already.”
“Everything’s so dry here. I’ve practically abandoned the garden.”
They made trivial conversation; the important questions hanging in the air like wash on a line stretching coast to coast.
“I’ll pick you up,” Hannah said. “Look for the woman having a hot flash.”
“Still?”
“The doctor says a few women have it bad despite hormone replacement. I seem to be one of those.”
Liz tried to read Hannah’s voice. False cheer? Hard to tell with her, even after decades of friendship.
“The up side is I’m saving a fortune on blusher.”
They could go on like this for hours. They could pirouette around and about one hundred subjects, silly and profound, twirl through menopause, family, gardens, clothes and makeup, animals, world affairs, God, and never once come down off their toes long enough to talk about Bluegang. After so many years wasn’t there something deeply, even dangerously, strange about this determined silence? Gerard said there was.
More desultory conversation and then Hannah had to go off to a place called Resurrection House where she was a volunteer. Something about crack babies. She was always taking care of someone or something. Mother to the world, that was Hannah. Liz walked back into the hotel room, closed the sliding door, and picked up her room key and purse and went out into the hall and down to the elevator.
The hotel had more amenities than most villages in Belize where Liz and Gerard lived. On a wet and windy night she could buy a wardrobe for a family, liquor and salsa and gourmet sausage, books and souvenirs and laxatives, without ever leaving the hotel’s protection. She stepped out of the elevator and fitted her dark glasses over her ears. The fluorescent midday dimmed to a murky twilight. In the drugstore she bought a plastic spray bottle, the kind used to spritz hair or sprinkle clothes back when housewives still stood at ironing boards.
A garish sign in Spanish and English in the window of a hair salon caught her eye: NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY. Reflected next to it she saw herself. A tallish middle-aged woman, thin and long-muscled after a tubby childhood. Her features—even her nose—seemed miniaturized in contrast to her thick dark hair like a chrysanthemum gone wild.
The salon’s Cuban manager—her elided accent was easy to identify—warned Liz the electricity might go off at any time. Did she really want to get her hair done in the middle of a hurricane?
“I’m no’ workin’ by flashligh’, ya know.”
“I’ll risk it.”
Now that she had noticed it, her hair seemed like a blind, a bosky hideout, and she couldn’t wait to escape it. She was soul-sick of hiding. Besides, a haircut always lifted her spirits, gave her confidence, which she needed for what lay ahead. But later when she stared at her image in the mirror over the bathroom sink the swingy dark hair shaped to the curve of her jaw didn’t do it. She felt no more up to what lay ahead than she had an hour earlier though certainly the cut improved her appearance. And at least she wasn’t hiding anymore.
She walked out onto the balcony, unscrewed the spritz top of the bottle she had bought and held it out beyond the balcony’s shallow overhang. The hard rain almost drove it out of her hand. For several moments she stood with her arm outstretched, getting wet to the shoulder, filling the plastic bottle with rainwater. Afterwards she screwed the top back on and put it in her purse, standing it upright so it wouldn’t leak.
She lay on the expanse of bed that faced the window, folded her hands across her stomach and thought about the week ahead.
Liz had been back to Rinconada fewer than a dozen times since college graduation almost thirty years ago. Her parents had retired from the state university system and moved to La Jolla in Southern California where Liz had visited them only twice before they died, within months of each other. But despite distance and time her friendship with Hannah and Jeanne had endured. They met two or three times a year on more neutral territory, spoke often on the phone; and now they had long, searching conversations electronically. Rinconada had become a kind of destination of last resort, a place she went to only because she knew it was expected of her occasionally. The town of her childhood was gone—the blossoming trees and one-lane roads, vacant lots alight with wild mustard—smothered in silicon, buried under new houses and chic stores up and down the main street where once she and Hannah and Jeanne had been known by every proprietor.
The Three Musketeers. Battle, Murder and Sudden Death. The Unholy Trinity.
Gone utterly yet she knew that behind and beneath the new architecture, the widened